History

The organisation

The AEEE was formed from a predecessor organisation “The Working Committee of Secondary Economics Education in EEC Countries”. Its two founders were Dicky Phillips, Secretary of the British Economics Association, and Edouard Maurice, an Economics Educationist at University Foundation of St. Ignatius, Antwerp. The first exploratory meeting of the Working Committee took place in Antwerp, Belgium in 1974. This led to the decision to mount of series of biennial conferences, each of which led to the publication of a book with position papers on a variety of key issues facing economics educators across the EEC, with the same name as the conferences.

The Working Committee expanded its membership to include one representative from each EEC country. In some countries the representative came from a national economics teachers’ association; in others, notably, France and Wallonie, the representative was a national inspector; one or two countries were represented by individual, distinguished teacher trainers, e.g. Italy.

In 1990 the Association of European Economics Education (AEEE) was formed, to widen participation and reduce dependence on the European Commission. The new constitution was written by Steve Hurd, from the UK, and ratified by the Council of the Working Committee. The AEEE had two classes of membership: associations, who each had a member of Council, and individual members, who received the Association’s journal “Economia” and could attend conferences and a General Assembly. Within 4 years AEEE individual membership grew to 650, and conference attendance expanded substantially. Thanks to financial assistance from European Commission programmes, the pattern of biennial conferences continued.